Australia’s “houses and holes” economy is based around property and commodity exports. As the country heads to national elections due by May 21, it is increasingly boxed in by those narrow parameters.
For decades, successive mineral booms (iron ore, coal, gas) and growing Asian demand have underpinned economic activity. The most recent cycle (which started around the mid 2000s) increased investment to around 8 per cent of gross domestic product. Employment, wages and household disposable incomes rose around 3 per cent, 6 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.
The housing economy consists of residents buying and selling property from and to each other for ever-higher prices using borrowed money in a surreal pyramid of paper wealth creation, which hit A$9tn (more than 4 times GDP) in 2021.